Microsoft announced officially support scenarios for virtualization of some OCS roles. This is huge because OCS requires many servers to deploy all of the optional roles. Prior to this announcement, there was no guarantee that Microsoft would support your environment if you had an issue while running any role on a virtualized platform. This support limitation could be a deterrent to some organizations. Now that Microsoft has annouced these official supported configurations, more people will be likely to use these optional features. Only virtualization platforms running Hyper-V or a Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) certified partner solution will be supported.
Presence, Instant Messaging (including remote access, federation, and Public IM Connectivity) and Group Chat workloads are supported for virtualization. The following server roles can be deployed on virtual machines:
- Front-End Servers
- Back-End SQL Server 2008 64 bits
- Group Chat Channel Servers
- Group Chat Compliance Servers
- Edge Access Servers
The virtual machines must be running on Windows Server 2008 64-bit. Archiving Server and Monitoring Server can be connected to a virtualized Enterprise pool, but they must run on a physical server. The fully virtualized distributed topology has been tested to handle up to 40,000 users, including 10,000 group chat users.
Virtualization of the other workloads is not supported because of possible quality issues with real-time media.
Specifically, voice, video, live meeting and desktop sharing workloads cannot be part of the virtualized deployment. Therefore audio/video/web conferencing servers, audio/video/web edge conferencing servers, dial-in conferencing, Communicator Web Access, enterprise voice, or Remote Call Control may not be deployed as part of the virtualized pool.
If any one of these workloads is required, a new pool with physical servers must be deployed for those users. For more information about support for client virtualization technologies like Terminal Services and Citrix, please refer to the official support statement at: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951152.
In order to plan both their physical and virtualized topologies, customers can use Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Capacity Planning Tool, which can simulate user load for the available workloads. This will help customers validating the hypervisor load and scalability before going to production.
Official Whitepaper: “Running Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 in a Virtualized Topology”
This document describes the results of a series of configurations that were run in a Hyper-V environment to validate that Office Communications Server on Hyper-V provides stable performance and scalability for production use.
The support statement at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd572860(office.13).aspx will be updated in the next few days to reflect this.
Original post @ http://blogs.technet.com/jkruse/archive/2009/05/13/ocs-2007-r2-virtualisation-support.aspx?CommentPosted=true#commentmessage
OCS Team Post @ http://communicationsserverteam.com/archive/2009/05/13/488.aspx
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